My experience with Dennis Michael Brown of Sagas Architecture (he’s sole proprietor) is that first off, he talks incessantly. I always wonder if I am ‘on the clock’ when he drones on and on. Evidently I am, as the budget he gave us for our house design mysteriously went over-budget by almost 50% even though the only changes we ever made were at the initial floor plans stages to rearrange a few rooms (including moving a laundry room to bring it up to code for the length of the dryer vent, which was Dennis’ error anyway) and moving bathrooms to outside walls so they could have windows (which again was Dennis’ error, since we’d stated we don’t want a bathroom without a window.) And moving the dining room to be beside the kitchen rather than separated by the family room (which just seems common sense to me….)
Dennis never gave us a printed invoice or bill. He constantly pressured us to pay him one the spot when he told us what we owed (tho our contract reads we have 7 days) He’d tell us he had to buy his wife’s diabetes meds or horse hay. Even when we paid him in full for our plans he told us he 'forgot' his stamp and wouldn't stamp them. We’d already made the mistake of asking him to help us figure our how to read our plans to get the amount of materials needed for things like pieces of drywall, amount of siding, amount of electrical wires and boxes, etc. (We were owner-contracting with friends’ labor and wanted to know how much we needed in materials to allow us to go out and price stuff) Dennis told us that was called doing ‘take offs’ and that he could help us with that. Well, he created a bill for over 13 hours of his doing these take offs on our 1500 sq ft home (which we stopped him on when we heard what the bill was coming to and figured we’d have to figure it out on our own) and then he gives them to us and all they are is dollar figures like $750 for carpeting. He didn’t know what finishes we wanted, he never gave us any material quantities at all. Nothing told us which rooms he’d carpeted, with what kind of carpet. We asked him and he acted like we were idiots that he had to explain this minutia to but we pressed him and he told us he’d figured high quality carpet plus labor for 3 bedrooms. For $750??? He answered “there is less than 20 yards of carpet in the house 3 bedrooms and closets” Huh. 20 sq yards would be 180 square feet. We could see right away that even if you had three tiny 9’x9’ bedrooms (which we didn’t) that’d be 243 sq ft. When we talked to other building industry professionals, they told us take offs shouldn’t take that long to do for our home. (Dennis had told us if we asked subcontractors to do take offs they’d charge us for the work.) This turned out to not be true. We’ve gotten several takes offs on all sorts of materials, suggestions on where to buy supplies on our own, and assistance in reading our plans for free from everyone we’ve contacted. We also discovered we had no rebar schedule for our ICF home. And we had a full page of truss engineering from Dennis but when we checked into his license we discovered he’s not an engineer. He never consulted with a licensed engineer on our plans either, but we have an e-mail where he tells us he is billing us for engineering time. We refused to pay him for the worthless take offs but he kept our $1000 retainer to pay himself. We never got a bill for the remainder in over 3 months but we asked for our money back based upon what we’d found out was missing on our plans and that he shouldn’t be charging us for engineering if an engineer didn’t do the work. He’d never stamped our plans although we’d paid him for the actual plans in full. His response was to put a lien for 3 times the amount he said we owed him ($784 the lien was for $2481) on our property. And to tell us he’d charge us $350 to get an engineer review (so we’d pay twice for engineering.) Nice guy. Funny thing, though, not only had he never mentioned to us that we needed an engineer review (until we complained about him) but we eventually found 6 other clients who worked with him, had engineering done, actually built their homes but they never had any engineer review either. (Their costs also went 50% or more over budget for no reason ever given to them.) By the way, the Board instructed him March 21, 2008 that he is not allowed to do engineering calculations or label his work as engineering and needs to hire a licensed engineer. So if you work with him, be sure you know that. This is a matter of public record.
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